Should You Go Wide or Join KDP Select/Kindle Unlimited?

When I uploaded my first book, The Emperor’s Edge, in December of 2010, it was a foregone conclusion that I would put it out there everywhere I could, in the hope that new readers would stumble across it and give it a try. Then, a couple of years later, Amazon introduced KDP Select, a program for self-publishers that requires exclusivity.

Right off the bat, Amazon introduced a couple of promotional tactics that are still available to those who are enrolled. Eventually, Kindle Unlimited and the ability to be paid for borrows also came along.

Here’s what the perks of KDP Select look like as I write this in October of 2015 (let me know if I’ve missed any!):

The ability to run a Countdown Deal once per quarter, a feature that, among other things, let’s you run sales on books (i.e. dropping them to 99 cents) while still receiving the 70% split that’s usually only available with ebooks priced between $2.99 and $9.99.
The ability to run a Free Book Promotion up to five days per quarter (The only other way to have a book listed as free in the Kindle store is to make it free elsewhere and hope Amazon price matches. This is unreliable and may involve being free longer than you wish.).
Enrollment in Kindle Unlimited, the Amazon lending library, where you’ll be paid for pages read and where ebook borrows can improve your visibility and sales ranking in the Kindle store (I did a big write up about this last year: KDP Select & Kindle Unlimited: Why Ebooks Not Enrolled Are at a Disadvantage).
Earning 70% on appropriately priced books sold in some of Amazon’s newer territories such as Japan, India, Brazil and Mexico (for some reason, perhaps to make KDP Select more appealing, Amazon decided not to offer everyone that 70%, as is the norm in other countries).

So, what do you lose? Obviously, if you’re exclusive with Amazon, you can’t receive ebook income from the other stores. Let me emphasize that we’re only talking about ebook income, as you can still have audiobooks in iTunes and paperbacks in Barnes & Noble and elsewhere. But, as you probably already know, ebook income is huge for self-published authors. Even though I’m working on getting more audiobooks out there, and I’ve done paperbacks for most of my novels, ebooks easily account for 95% of my income.

Are you wide or in Select?

Before I go further, I should disclose that I am not in KDP Select with any of the books under my name, but that my pen name is currently “all in” with KDP Select. I started the pen name books there, to take advantage of the sales ranking/visibility boost from Kindle Unlimited, and I returned them to KDP Select this August, after not gaining much headway in the other stores and after Amazon switched to Kindle Unlimited 2.0, a system that rewards novelists by paying based on total pages read.

For my LB books, I’ve been around longer, and my books do sell on the other platforms, especially on Barnes & Noble (Kobo has been coming on strong these last few months too). I also make some sales on iTunes and Smashwords, and through Smashwords, I make a nominal amount at Overdrive, Oyster, and Scribd. The Emperor’s Edge (Book 1 in a series that has grown to 9 books) and Flash Gold (the first in a steampunk series of novellas) have been permanently free out there for years, something that I’m sure has helped with finding readers in other places.

Still, even with all that, Amazon always seems to make up about 85-90% of my ebook income. In my case, if things are going well elsewhere, they’re going even better at Amazon.

There have been times that I’ve considered trying KDP Select with a couple of my series, to see how much it would affect sales and if I would make more overall with the borrows added in. But after almost five years of publishing widely, I’ve gained some loyal readers from those other platforms. It’s uncomfortable enough when I have to explain that my pen name books are only available on Amazon!

I also, from a moral and business standpoint, don’t like the idea of being exclusive with Amazon and relying wholly on one vendor for my income. I’m quite tickled to have reached the point, in the last year or two, where my non-Amazon income has grown to enough that I could still make a living at this if Amazon disappeared. (Of course, I hope it won’t!)

But I understand why some authors choose exclusivity and KDP Select. With 3-4 books out wide in all of the stores, my pen name made a little shy of $1,000 on platforms other than Amazon between January 2015 and July 2015 (that’s total, not per month). I had the first book in the series free, and I even managed to snag a Bookbub ad during that time. That helped a bit with sales on those other platforms, but not as much as I would have expected (I should note that my pen name writes science fiction romance, and Bookbub doesn’t have such a category–they put the book in paranormal romance, which I don’t believe was a good fit). The pen name gained some readers at Barnes & Noble, but barely sold any books at iBooks or Kobo.

Now, might things change if I had kept the pen name books in all of the stores for years and continued to have a permafree and continued to run promotions? Sure, it’s very likely that the income would have grown with time, but I do feel a little hampered with running ads for SFR, since it’s not a specific category for advertisements anywhere. Not all (or many) romance readers will pick up SF, and not all (or many) sci-fi readers will pick up romance. The niche does sell on Amazon, but it and romance > fantasy are definitely the smallest of the romance subcategories.

Since it’s tough to gain traction in that little category, I’ve found it easier to make headway by being in Kindle Unlimited, where those borrows help boost the book high enough in the rankings (at least when they’re new releases) that they can appear in the Top 20 of the SFR category for several weeks. I found it tough to stick in that Top 20 on sales alone (for a small subcategory, there’s still a lot of churn, and it takes around a 1000 overall ranking to hit that first page).

When KU changed to KU2.0 this summer, I decided to put all of the pen name books back into KDP Select. I’d probably recommend almost anyone doing a pen name start out this way, not only because it takes more effort to gain traction on the other stores but also because, if you’re publishing frequently, it’s more work to upload everywhere and keep the back matter updated. (I just did a serial with the pen name and was so pleased that I wasn’t putting up all six weekly installments everywhere.) As they say, time is money, and you want to make sure you’re not spending a lot of time on activities that don’t reward you with much of a payoff.

So, what was the result?

As I write this, we don’t know the September pages-read-payment-rate for Kindle Unlimited yet, but if it’s close to the .0051 rate of August, the pen name will have made over $10,000 just in borrows. A lot of that is thanks to a serial I published in August/September, but the books that struggled to make $1,000 all year in the other stores still accounted for about $3,000 in September. Sales took a slight dip from July, when the books weren’t in KU, but that only accounted for a $200 loss against that $10,000 gain.

In a situation like that, it’s hard not to sing the praises of Amazon and Kindle Unlimited, so I get it when people tell me they’ve tried both ways, and they’re sticking with KDP Select for now. Exclusivity sucks, but if you’re able to make orders of magnitude more within the program than you do outside of it, then it has to be considered. Against all logic, you could even be reaching more readers being exclusive with Amazon than you are being on all of the platforms.

Of course, this is not the case for everybody. That’s important to point out. I don’t want this to be like the “should I trad publish or self publish?” argument that goes around, as if it’s so easy to get those trad deals and it’s a simple either/or consideration.

If you can’t parlay those KU borrows into a Top 100 placement in your subcategories, then it’s becomes more of a toss-up as to whether being in KDP Select will help. The promotional perks (Countdown Deals and Free Promotions) aren’t without value, but KU earnings and the ranking boosts you currently get from those borrows are the reasons I’m there with the pen name (note: a borrow is always going to be easier to get than a sale, because it’s absolutely free to someone who’s paid their monthly subscription fee).

Now that I’ve shared my experiences, as someone who’s wide and who is also in KDP Select, I’m going to try and break things down a bit for those of you who might be trying to decide.

When does it make more sense to go wide?

Obviously, if you’re doing well on the other vendors, then you don’t want to give that up. It’s rare, but every now and then, I run into someone who’s selling like hotcakes at Apple (so far these have always been romance people — I’d love to hear from anyone who is killing it there in other genres!).

If you’re reading this post, I’ll assume it’s not so black and white for you.

In my opinion, if you’ve come to rely on your self-publishing income, and especially if this is your only source of income, being exclusive with Amazon should make you twitchy. You should be doing your darndest to diversify your income sources.

When KU 1.0 was introduced, it rewarded those who published short fiction and serials, because every single borrow was paid out at the same rate. Page length didn’t matter. All that mattered was if the reader made it past 10% (something that comes quickly in a short ebook). Some people started catering their work to KU, writing lots of short fiction and serialized fiction. When KU2.0 rolled around, and we started getting paid based on pages reads, people who’d been making thousands of dollars a month on short fiction were suddenly making hundreds, if that.

Obviously, one of the lessons is not change your writing style or quit your day job prematurely based on success in one program at one outlet, but I think the lesson is also not to rely only on one vendor, not when your income pays the rent and feeds the cats. What if Amazon decided to drop the split from 70% to 35% on all ebooks one day? Would you still be okay? Or would you be wishing you had income from other sources? (And if you think that can’t happen, Amazon started paying out only 35% in the old days.)

If you’re in KDP Select now because you’re rocking it, you might take a look at your books. Are they all rocking it or are some titles performing less well? It might be worth it to have some stuff in KDP Select and other books out there where you might gradually pick up fans on other platforms.

Also, like I said in the beginning, that exclusivity doesn’t apply to paperbacks and audiobooks. If you haven’t jumped into those arenas yet, this might be the time. Paperbacks do especially well in the months leading up to Christmas!

When does it make more sense to try KDP Select and exclusivity?

If self-publishing is hobby income right now, and it’s not a big deal if you lose it, it probably means you’re not selling that much yet. I think that’s the perfect time to experiment with KDP Select.

If you’re not selling much anywhere, you may find it easier to get those KU borrows when you’re out there promoting. As I said above, it’s easier to snag a borrow than a sale — it’s almost akin to having a free ebook up on Amazon, but you’re still making money from it. There’s no risk to the borrower to give it a try.

In the last year, since KU came into place, I’ve seen more no-name/no-backlist/no-mailing-list authors make it to the tops of the charts in the subcategories that I follow than ever before. Almost without fail, they’re in KU and they have an awesome cover that fits in with genre expectations. They don’t always have great reviews! Sometimes the blurbs are “just okay” too.

I believe this is a result of people being willing to borrow something they wouldn’t buy and those borrows counting for as much as a sale (it’s very possible borrows won’t always count for as much as a sale, as Amazon is always tinkering, but it still seems to be the case now). And once a book sticks in the sales rankings for a while, it gets rewarded by Amazon’s algorithms, and it gets plugged in Amazon’s newsletters. That stickiness is what we all crave!

(A side note: one of the reasons it’s almost always harder to gain traction on the other stores is that they seem to do more merchandising and hand selecting of items that will be promoted, as opposed to letting the “bots” make the decisions. I’ve had strong advertising runs result in stickiness at Barnes & Noble, but I’ve noticed it much less at Kobo and iBooks.)

Again, I don’t want to make it sound like everyone is going to have this kind of luck, but it does seem to be easier to manufacture some luck with the help of KU borrows.

Pen names

As I already explained with my own stuff, it’s easier to only have to worry about Amazon with the pen name. I’m still busy publishing as much as ever under my regular name, so it’s nice not to have upload new pen name ebooks at all of the vendors and change prices and blurbs across the board for sales.

If your pen name starts rocking it, you can always go wide later. But if you’re doing the pen name anonymously and don’t have your regular list to rely upon for sales, then that my be another reason to try KDP Select with it. (Here’s — I started out anonymously and, with the help of KDP Select, made some pretty good money out of the gate.)

For translations in countries where you don’t have a way to market

I know nothing about this personally, but Joanna Penn mentioned this last year when she was debating the pros and cons of KDP Select.

When you’re in a niche/category that’s hard to crack with advertising alone

As I explained up above, it’s hard to find ads that work for my pen name, since “she” writes cross-genre fiction. Many of the sponsorship sites now divide readers based on genre preferences, but broadly. They don’t target those small overlaps on the Venn diagrams. If ads aren’t working for you (or you don’t have enough reviews to get them), KU and the promotional perks from KDP Select could also be helpful.

All right, there’s my take on this all. I would love to hear from you. Are you in KDP Select? Are you wide? Have you tried both ways? What was your experience?